1. Field of the Invention
The present invention includes a composition comprising an agricultural mixture containing at least one pigment. The present invention includes compositions, methods for manufacture, methods for use, and turf maintenance kits.
2. Description of Related Art
Warm season grasses provide lush green carpets and ornamental borders for a wide range of commercial purposes such as lawns, parks, golf courses, ground covers, and sports fields. These grasses thrive well in warm weather climates and during the warm season of cold weather climates. During periods of cold, however, even of short duration, grasses such as Bermuda grass go dormant and turn brown. Further, under dry winter conditions, these grasses not only turn in color, their growth is stunted and they tend to go to seed thus destroying their green carpet or ornamental effect. Natural grasses that remain green during cold weather for the most part do not provide the richness and visual beauty of warm season grasses.
Where warm season grasses are planted for warm weather use, attempts are made to hide the withering and browning effects of cold weather. These include over-seeding warm grasses with cold season and transitional grasses such as Kentucky bluegrass, tall fescue, and perennial ryegrass to provide a green cover during the cold season. Nevertheless, if the temperature goes too low, the desired warm season grass requires replanting in the spring. In some cases a green appearance is maintained during the cold season by using green paint to color brown grass or by spreading green pellets to maintain a green color on the ground. In addition to being high maintenance and costly, these solutions do not provide a suitable alternative for the lushness of a warm season grass turf. Further, such solutions may, in fact, harm the underlying turf.
In these paint compositions, permanent pigments in water and latex based suspensions are applied to turf to mask damage or to artificially color warm season grasses during periods of seasonal dormancy. The products, generally, are permanent green paint. These conventionally-employed pigments and dyes are however intended merely to color lawns at their surfaces, and no physiological effects for plants are observed on their coloring components themselves. In these conventional colorant compositions, emulsions of acrylate ester resins, vinyl acetate resins, ethylene-vinyl acetate resins or the like or emulsions of water-dispersible polymers, such as synthetic rubber latexes, are also used as adhesives for fixing coloring components on turfgrass. Incidentally, an emulsion of a polymer generally cannot form polymer films at temperatures lower than its film-forming temperature, so that a coloring component, especially a pigment cannot be fixed on turf grass outside of a specified temperature range. Further, in order to ensure adequate cover, such compositions are normally applied at lower rates per volume and require multiple application passes in different directions for uniform application. An example of a typical rate for such products is approximately 300-800 L/ha.